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June 30, 2004

I've always had a passion for making lists. Unfortunately, this passion usually sputters and dies when it comes to cataloging my library. (Hint for baby academics: start cataloging your books before you have 5,000 of them. You'll be much happier. Really.) There is a bright side, however: whenever an occasional burst of cataloging energy hits, I can rest happy in the knowledge that the books are already categorized and in alphabetical order. The only exception to this rule is the biography section, which, for some reason, has wound up in its own room; it's in alphabetical order by subject, rather than by author.

Last night, while taking a well-earned break from, ugh, house-cleaning (parents on the horizon!), I amused myself by ranking biographical subjects according to the number of lives I'd acquired of them. I've included formal autobiographies, but not collections of letters, unpublished notes (e.g., Disraeli's Reminiscences), or journals. Multi-volume biographies (e.g., Ehrman's Younger Pitt) count as one.

Queen Victoria: 10

Benjamin Disraeli: 9 (but not Monypenny & Buckle)

W. E. Gladstone: 6

George Eliot: 5

Charlotte Bronte: 4+1 group biography

Jane Austen: 4

Charles Dickens: 4

William Pitt the Younger: 4 (including John Ehrman's behemoth)

John Ruskin: 4

Sir Walter Scott: 4 (including Edgar Johnson, but only an abridged John Lockhart)

As I was going through my collection more generally, I noticed that I tend to acquire biographies for their contextual value, rather than for their subjects per se. While some of the multiples reflect my personal enthusiasms, others are there primarily for background. There certainly can't be any other reason for me to have four biographies of William Pitt the Younger, to whom I have a weird personal aversion (if one can be personally averse to someone who's been dead nearly two hundred years...). You'd think I'd have more lives of, say, Charles Darwin. Including letters & whatnot, the total runs to about 600 biographies & autobiographies.

More historical fiction ahoy. Into seafaring fiction? Broadside: The Nautical Fiction Website "covers nautical fiction set between 1740, the start of Commodore Anson's circumnavigation, and 1815, the year of the final defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo."

Parents ahoy. Starting tomorrow, Dad the Soon-to-be-Emeritus Historian of Graeco-Roman Egypt and Mom the Just-Retired Coordinator of Special Education will be gracing my humble home. I feel a bad case of Parental-Presence-Induced Childhood coming on.

June 27, 2004

No, no: the bookcases haven't fallen down, Victoria hasn't dislocated her toe (again), the new roof isn't leaking. But, as regular visitors to this blog may recall, I've got to teach George Bernard Shaw's Man and Superman in the fall. (I don't have a choice in the matter--it's a set text for all sections of this course.) Right now, I am perilously close to wallowing in the depths of despair, because my students are going to hate this play. Absolutely. Positively. Whole-heartedly. It's talky; it alludes to people no freshman of any sort will ever have heard of, let alone read; its prose is often wooden. Worse still, I'm going to have to teach it fairly early in the semester, because we're all going to see it at the Shaw Festival. I may be able to rescue things somewhat by teaching the text after we see the play, instead of before, because the students will then have the comedy in mind (Ann's manipulations in Act I, for example, are extremely funny). Still, I fear for my soul--or, at least, for my teaching evaluations. On the positive side, I think I've figured out how to jury-rig a course around it and the other set text, Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed.

June 26, 2004

For several years now, while teaching courses in “creative nonfiction” and moderating seminars with titles like "Where Fact Meets Fiction," I have been wrestling with such questions [about the "line between likely imaginings and wholesale invention”]. And Potter and Owen are right in perceiving that I have a beef with the way history is conventionally written. I believe we can draw nearer the elusive truth – and also make history more vivid and accessible -- by combining scholarship with imagination, and by augmenting traditional “analytical narrative” with the techniques of fiction (scene, dialogue, point of view).

Perhaps McGoogan is just using "the way history is conventionally written" in an excessively loose fashion, but I fail to see how his chosen solution is any less conventional. Herodotus, anyone? The invented speech? Like it or not, however, such tactics stopped signifying as "history" centuries ago--as the anti-Jacobin polemicist, novelist, and pedagogical theorist Elizabeth Hamilton discovered when she tried to resuscitate them for The Memoirs of the Life of Agrippina, Wife of Germanicus (1804). It's not that the relationship between history and fiction should necessarily be like that of a sphere, projecting against a plane; after all, aren't many historians and biographers good at scene-setting, narrative tension, and so forth? But he's right that most would not recognize the following as "history":

For example, I cite a passage in which Williams reveals that two bitter enemies confronted each other aboard a discovery ship. Because the records and log books have not survived, he moves on without elaborating, as mandated by the pseudo-scientific conventions of analytical narrative:

“Here, where even the dullest novelist would leap to reconstruct the confrontation scene, Williams refuses to speculate, to go beyond the dubious evidence of primary documents. He declines to dramatize his best guess, well-informed though it certainly is. One can’t help wondering what would happen if superlative historians like Glyn Williams stopped pretending that they practice science and accepted that they write literature. Maybe history would begin to regain its audience?”

Subversive, you see? Reviewing Ancient Mariner, Owen asks: Where do we draw the lines? The writer of historical fiction, I believe, has taken out a license to change dates, names and venues, and to invent, combine or kill off characters, whatever; the writer of historical nonfiction, on the other hand, must work within the known facts, changing and ignoring none of them. I take the position that, having assimilated the relevant journals, letters, biographies and histories, the non-fiction writer can then use imagination and craft to bridge gaps in the record.

This seems to me to be a distinction without a difference. Indeed, Gore Vidal normally describes his own novelistic practices very much as McGoogan is here describing nonfiction. There are all sorts of other things wrong in these paragraphs--for starters, popular history (especially military history & Civil War) has a huge audience, and, to my knowledge, most historians aren't under the impression that they're the reincarnation of Ranke (surely being beholden to one's evidence isn't the same thing as doing "pseudo-science"?!)--but I'll let the historians handle it.

UPDATE: The morning after, "distinction without a difference" seems unnecessarily abrupt. To elaborate, McGoogan exaggerates the "license" allowed to historical novelists, who can change only so much before their work becomes either risible or alternate history. (Anyone who has ever snickered through a bad historical film knows of what I speak.) Hence the "ever since Scott" tendency to push major historical figures off to the margins. At the same time, as I said, McGoogan's definition of historical nonfiction actually sounds remarkably close to how many historical novelists would define their own practice. I've mentioned Gore Vidal; my father has also on occasion pointed out that Mary Renault's Funeral Games (the power struggles in the wake of Alexander the Great's death) is very much tied to the historical evidence, even to the extent of speculating why some of the evidence has vanished.

June 25, 2004

Act your age? Apparently not. Born on what day of the week? No idea. But Jane Eyre was on TV at the time.Chore you hate? Cleaning the tub.Dad’s name? Stanley Mayer.Essential makeup item? I rarely wear makeup (no, not a feminist statement--it does bad things to my skin). Concealer, I suppose.Favorite actor? Hmmm...I guess it's a tie between Julian Wadham and Peter Blythe. (UPDATE 7/1: Peter Blythe died 6/27 at age 69.) Gold or silver? Gold.Hometown? Los Angeles. Instruments you play? Used to play piano.Job title? Assistant Professor of English.Kids? Not last time I checked.Living arrangements? Three-bedroom house in the village.Mom’s name? Dorothy Lenore.Need? I've never turned down money.Overnight hospital stays? None.Phobias? Bugs.Quote you like? "I will not go down to posterity talking bad grammar." (Disraeli)Religious affiliation? Jewish.Siblings? Younger sister.Time you wake up? Usually sometime between 6:00 and 8:00 AM.Unique talent? I read very, very, very quickly. Useful talent for a Victorianist...Worst habit? I'm terrible at filing things.X-rays you’ve had? Dental, chest, back, hand (broken finger), ankle.Yummy food you make? Spaghetti with sauce made from scratch. Zodiac Sign? Leo.

Timothy Mowl, William Beckford: Composing for Mozart (John Murray, 1998). Biography of the famous eccentric who wrote Vathek and built Fonthill Abbey. There's a 3D recreation of Fonthill here; more images at the Beckford Project.

June 23, 2004

Alas, no proofreader is perfect (especially when you're proofreading yourself). A couple of goofs I failed to catch:

1. Turning Helen Maria Williams into "Helena." Actually, I realized that I'd done this when I caught myself making the same error at Butterflies and Wheels, but it was too late to fix the mistake. I've got no clue what I was thinking. Did I stick the "a" on at the end because "Helena" just sounds more, um, Romantic? Poetic? To make "Helen" rhyme with "Maria"? Huh?

2. For some reason, I made Mrs. Jane West publish her anti-Jacobin historical allegory The Loyalists two years too early, in 1810 instead of 1812. (Since I do talk about a couple of other things published in 1810, I suspect that there was an accidental "spill" of sorts.) A. E. Housman's chorus won't be saying "thine arithmetic is quite correct."

My colleagues also inquired about an odd omission from the acknowledgments page. You see, I failed to mention Victoria and Disraeli. And so, I here thank them for sitting on books and manuscripts, playing with pens, walking on the keyboard, standing in front of the monitor [she says, shoving a cat out of the way], and, in general, interfering with the book to the best of their ability.

The argument that academic credentials don't matter is heard often from administrators and professors who defend unaccredited degrees.

Oh. Let's see. I think the Woodrow Wilson Foundation spent about $80,000 to fund my five years at the University of Chicago. Just think how much money they could have saved if I had gone this route:

Mr. del Corral, the Tulane instructor, had completed much of his doctoral work at Louisiana State University but wanted to avoid the hassle of facing a dissertation committee. So he called Lacrosse University, which was based in Louisiana until 2002, when state authorities declined to renew its license. (It is now based in Mississippi.) Lacrosse charges $2,200 for a Ph.D. An admissions counselor told a caller that he could receive a bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees, all in less than a year.

Golly, those dissertation committees really are a hassle, aren't they? I mean, you've got to, like, read and write and--gag me with a spoon!--think. Seriously uncool. Would Mr. del Corral have a problem with students who bought their homework from someone else? After all, who wants to have the "hassle" of "facing" the instructor's grading standards?

June 21, 2004

Mike Snider doesn't quite see how you can read this poem by Georgia Douglas Johnson as any sort of pentameter. I'd add that it's not just a matter of counting the syllables. If you can recognize the allusion to Tennyson in the last line, you'll know how to scan the poem.

UPDATE: By which I don't mean to imply that Mike Snider thinks that "counting the syllables" is the be-all and end-all of prosody! In this instance, however, any reader who bothers to stop and count will realize that there isn't a single durned pentameter line to be found.